RFC 11: Curved Labels

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Lime wrote:
> Hi all: You may or may not know that a patch for curved label support just mysteriously appeared one morning a bit ago in bugzilla. Output is pretty impressive. I worked with the author on a few integration points (collision avoidance being the biggie) and an patched patch was submitted in the last week. (Thanks Benj!)
> 
> Anyway, we wrote up a quick RFC for your consideration. See:
> 
>   http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-11
> 

I'm ready to say +1, but just a quick comment about "ANGLE FOLLOW" in 
the mapfile... follow what? Should we use "ANGLE FOLLOWPATH" instead?

Also, what if we ever implement more advanced or more expensive 
algorithms later, for instance options to try different label positions 
in case of collisions, that would be more computationally expensive and 
we might not want to enable that by default so we'd need more mapfile 
options to control that. As we define a name for this new feature in the 
mapfile, should we plan for a way to name multiple algorithms or options 
in the future?

I guess I'm just thinking outloud... "ANGLE FOLLOW" (or FOLLOWPATH) 
could be fine for now and we can deprecate it later if we add more 
advanced options. At that point we will better know which kind of 
options we would need anyway.

Daniel
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------